Greece’s Foreign Minister, Nikos Dendias, has issued an exclusive message to The Greek Herald sending his well wishes to Greek Australians ahead of Christmas this year.
In the message, Mr Dendias stressed the strong bonds between Greece and Australia due to “common principles and values,” as well as the “historical ties” forged during the First and Second World Wars.
The Greek Foreign Minister also praised the bilateral relations between both countries, making specific reference to his meeting with former Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Marise Payne, in December last year.
Mr Dendias then turned to the contribution of Australia’s “dynamic and prosperous” Greek community towards fostering bilateral relations between Greece and Australia.
“Our Greek expatriates, now an integral part of Australian society and contributors to the progress and prosperity of Australia, make us proud with their presence in the country that welcomed them when they immigrated from Greece,” Mr Dendias said in his message.
“With their systematic promotion and support of Greece’s positions, our expatriates become ‘ambassadors’ of our country and contribute to the further strengthening of our already strong ties of friendship and cooperation with Australia.”
Mr Dendias concluded his message by sending his well wishes for “health, prosperity and happiness” to the Greek Australian community for Christmas.
Fire at Sts Anargiri Greek Orthodox church in Oakleigh, Victoria. Credit: jacquifelgate7.
“Sacraments (weddings and baptisms) can be rearranged through our Church Administration and can be conducted by Father Stavros at other available churches,” the statement added.
Victoria Police are continuing their investigations into the cause of the fire which broke out on Saturday, December 10.
The fire caused extensive damage to the office area and smoke damage throughout the church. No one was injured at the time.
The Hellenic Club of Canberra at Woden in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) has given the public a first look at its $146 million redevelopment plans aimed at attracting local and international visitors to a new precinct.
The Hellenic Club engaged the internationally renowned teams at Fender Katsalidis Architects and OCULUS to design the new Hellenic Precinct, and the development applications (DAs) have now been lodged with the ACT’s planning authority.
The final application is for a 12-storey hotel with 151 rooms, complete with restaurants and a bar on the ground level, an indoor recreation facility on level one and an auditorium on levels two and three. There are also plans for a 16-storey office block.
The proposed rooftop infinity pool. Photo: Purdon Planning.
The rendered designs show open public spaces surrounded by towering columns, a rooftop infinity pool and grand entryways.
President of the Hellenic Club, Andrew Satsias, said the masterplan is part of a move away from gaming machine revenue.
“We have held true to our focus on a non-residential development and identified multiple commercial anchors to drive foot traffic and visitation to our site and the broader Town Centre,” Mr Satsias said in a media release.
The site. Photo: Purdon Planning.
“This includes elevated entertainment, dining, social and commercial spaces that will attract local, national and international visitors.”
The Greek Herald first reported the Hellenic Club had plans to be redeveloped in March this year during an interview with Mr Satsias.
At the time, Mr Satsias said it was time for the Club to change and “to meet with the times” and promised a stronger promotion of both Hellenism and multiculturalism.
The Cypriot Energy Ministry announced on Wednesday that between two and three trillion cubic feet of natural gas has been uncovered in exploratory drilling in block six of Cyprus’ Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ).
The ministry said the discovery by ENI-TotalEnergies consortium in the ‘Zeus-1′ area of Block 6 is some 162 kilometres off Cyprus’ southern coast and at a depth of 2,300 metres.
Eni announces a new gas discovery offshore Cyprus with the Zeus-1 well, the third consecutive discovery in Block 6 that confirms a promising outlook for the area and its development. https://t.co/0r00nGEwnBpic.twitter.com/xvberq0B2Z
The block, containing a 105 metre column of gas, is located just 5 kilometres west of the ‘Cronos-1’ well where the consortium announced in August an estimated 2.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Cypriot Energy Minister Natasa Pilides welcomed the latest find and said that each such discovery strengthens Cyprus’ prospects for developing the gas fields, particularly considering the current European energy crisis compounded by Russia’s war in Ukraine.
The amount of gas already discovered inside Cyprus’ offshore economic zone is conservatively estimated at 12-15 trillion cubic feet, Pilides told The Associated Press.
Other companies also holding exploration licenses for blocks inside Cyprus’ EEZ include Chevron and partners Dutch Shell and Israeli NewMed, as well as ExxonMobil and partner Qatar Petroleum.
When the Higher School Certificate (HSC) results were released for Year 12 students across New South Wales on Thursday, December 15, Santina Vagerakas Costanzo was overjoyed to find she had ranked first in the state in Aboriginal Studies for 2022 and received an ATAR score of 98.1.
Santina, who has Greek and Italian heritage, chose Aboriginal Studies as part of her coursework at St Scholastica’s College in the Sydney suburb of Glebe to learn more about Aboriginal history.
With a passion for understanding other cultures and the injustice of Aboriginal history, Santina not only received the top ranking in Aboriginal Studies in NSW, but was also top of her class for her major project.
The Aboriginal Studies course provides students with opportunities to learn about Aboriginal Peoples’ relationship to the Land, Aboriginal heritage and identity. Students are required to develop a major protect as part of the course to learn about project colonialism, racism and prejudice, legislation and policy, and national and international indigenous community experiences.
Santina with her parents.
For her major project, Santina topped the class assessment when she created a programme called We build communities not prisons. The Year 12 student embarked on a challenging journey of interviewing elders, CEO’s and people who had been in prison for her project.
In the end, Santina had to devise a website and journal to demonstrate her ideology behind We build communities not prisons.
The Greek Herald spoke with Santina’s mum, Helen Vagerakas Costanzo, about her daughter’s achievements in Aboriginal Studies. She said there were countless hours spent in the library, as well as a tremendous amount of hard work and determination behind the completion of the project.
Santina with her English teacher, Janette Durand.(L-R) Libby Maloney Boarding House Principal, Santina and Kate Rayment, Principal.
Helen said Santina also faced challenging moments while completing the course, in particular the major project, but continued to persevere in bringing everything together.
Santina added to The Greek Herald that she was able to overcome these challenges by maintaining a work-life balance and “not burn out.” The student also credited her experience as a day border at St Scholastica’s College as a contributor to her results.
“Having a support network both at home and school, teachers that believed in me, that went the extra mile, friends that supported me and my journey, and a resilience that I built up over my younger years by being at a school more suited to me,” Santina told The Greek Herald about the secret to her success.
Ten years ago, NT Greek owned company, Halikos group, started supporting the Salvation Army by providing children and teens with goods including food, chocolates, toys and push bikes. This festive season, the tradition continues with yet another donation, The Advertiser reports.
In fact, 30 bikes were assembled by the company’s staff and were donated to children and families in need.
Salvation Army NT’s PR manager, Sally Courtney, thanked the group and said that “without the generous support of a number of local businesses and community clubs, we would not be in the position to have enough toys and gifts to meet the increasing demand each Christmas”.
“Children and teenagers all love to own a bike and they can be expensive to buy, particularly for families that have several children, therefore we are extremely grateful to have these donated by Halikos Construction,” she said.
Christmas is just around the corner and for many homes, preparations are already well underway.
From decorating Christmas trees to setting up the dinner table, there is a lot to be done if you are the one hosting Christmas this year.
Fear not though as The Greek Herald has taken one thing off your plate (pun intended). We asked chef David Tsirekas to put together a Greek feast like no other for your Christmas Day lunch.
Entrée – Pumpkin Filo Pie:
Ingredients:
1 large butternut pumpkin
2 green zucchinis
1 red capsicum
1 bunch shallots
1 teaspoon celery salt
1 teaspoon dried chilli flakes (optional)
1 cup of steamed rice
1/2 bunch parsley
1/2 bunch dill
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1 tablespoon fine semolina
Antoniou brand filo pastry
Carraway seeds
Vegetable ghee
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 180°.
Peel and grate pumpkin using food processor set to thick grate, or use box grater.
Repeat for zucchini and capsicum.
Chop entire shallots except for the roots.
Place all in mixing bowl.
Add roughly chopped parsley and dill, cumin, chilli flakes (optional) and place into a muslin cloth, tie and twist to remove any excess water.
Add rice and semolina. These will act as an absorbent in the cooking process as it releases liquids which will make the filo watery and stop it from going buttery and flaky.
Melt ghee.
Cut filo into 20cm squares. Brush a square liberally with ghee then place another square sheet, rotating it 45 degrees so it looks like a star.
Repeat again another 6 sheets. 8 in total making sure you add ghee each time.
Spoon in a cup full of the mix into the centre.
Wrap filo around the mix towards the centre making sure you encase it like a pillow. Brush ghee so the filo sticks together.
Place on flat tray with the overlapping filo placed downwards onto the tray with baking paper and repeat for rest of mixture until all used.
Sprinkle with carraway seeds and place in oven until golden brown.
Serve with fresh yoghurt or creamed fetta with toasted pecans.
Main – Mavrodaphne and petimezi glazed pork neck:
SERVES 6
Ingredients:
300ml Mavrodaphne Wine
450ml Petimezi – grape must syrup
4 tablespoons dark soy sauce
1 tablespoon smoked paprika
1 tablespoon ground cumin
1 teaspoon cracked pepper
2 cinnamon sticks
4 pieces of cloves
6 cloves of black garlic
1 whole piece pork neck with fat capped on and trimmed neatly – skinless
Instructions:
If you’re not confident trussing pork neck and rounding out the capped fat then ask your butcher to truss and trim. It’s always best to do this first step before roasting the pork.
Add mavrodaphne into saucepan.
In a food processor, add grape must syrup and black garlic cloves. Pulse until smooth.
Add to wine.
Add remaining ingredients (except for pork) and bring to boil. Simmer for 30 mins. Set aside to cool.
Place pork into bowl. Pour over some of the marinade and rub all over the pork generously. Keep some marinade for roasting.
Cover pork and chill overnight for best results. Four hours for minimum infusion of flavour.
Set oven to 200°.
Place pork into deep baking tray, preferably with a lid and a wire rack to sit on, and fill up to wire rack with water to steam. If you don’t have one, a normal roasting dish with a wire rack will do. Cover first with baking paper and then foil.
Turn oven down to 150° and cook slowly for 1.5 hours.
Remove lid or covering, and snip off twine now that the pork has roasted into shape. Turn oven up to 180°. Baste pork generously all around with chilled mavrodaphne glaze.
Roast uncovered for 15 minutes and then baste again. Roast for 10 minutes again.
Baste generously with glaze, turn oven up to 200° and roast for 10 last minutes.
Bring out, baste and allow to sit at room temp for five minutes before carving.
Dessert – Greek Christmas trifle:
SERVES 10-16
Ingredients for yoghurt cheesecake cream layer:
500G mascarpone cheese
500g thick Greek yoghurt
Zest and juice of 1 lime
100g thyme honey
½ teaspoon ground cinnamon
Instructions:
Fold all ingredients together being careful not to beat the mix too much or the mascarpone will split. Set aside to chill.
Ingredients for custard:
1L milk
300g caster sugar
1 vanilla bean – split lengthwise
3 egg yolks
200g butter
200g flour
Instructions:
Heat milk in a saucepan with the scraped-out seeds of vanilla bean. Add vanilla pod as well.
While heating milk, cream sugar and egg yolks together in a bowl until pale and creamy.
Bring milk to a simmer and then slowly add in a steady pour into the creamed egg yolks while whisking thoroughly for 2 minutes.
When whisked well, clean out saucepan and melt butter. Add flour and make roux. Cook over low heat for 2 mins.
Slowly add the egg/milk mix into the roux and whisk well while pouring in the egg/milk mix. Add little bits at a time making sure to whisk out any lumps and to smoothen the mix. Add all mix whilst continuing to whisk and allow the mix to thicken to a custard thickness.
Set aside into clean bowl with a piece of baking paper on surface of custard to not allow a thick skin to form. Chill in refrigerator. Set aside until construction.
Ingredients for Crispy Kataifi pastry:
1 packet of Kataifi pastry
250g unsalted butter
100g caster sugar
Instructions:
Preheat oven to 160°.
Open up kataifi and rip into smaller pieces. Place in large mixing bowl.
Add caster sugar.
Melt butter and then add to kataifi and sugar. Mix well.
Place onto flat baking tray, spread out well and bake until golden brown.
Occasionally check and stir so it browns evenly.
Set aside at room temperature to cool.
Ingredients for cherry jelly:
1 packet raspberry Aeroplane jelly (if you don’t want to use jelly you can use 3 teaspoons of gelatine powder)
500g jar of Morello cherries pitted
400g tin of Greek sweet cherries
200ml water
Instructions:
Strain and reserve the juice/liquid from both types of cherries from jars and keep the cherries together for construction (see below).
Place liquid into saucepan with water and bring to boil.
Change heat to simmer and whisk in jelly powder.
Cook until all powder has dissolved. Whisk for around 2 minutes whilst simmering.
Take saucepan off heat and to accelerate cooling, place saucepan into a bowl of ice and stir for around 5 minutes. This will reduce some of the heat so we can begin to construct the trifle.
Ingredients for whipped cream (or use canned whipped cream):
500ml pure cream
100g caster sugar
1/2 teaspoon vanilla paste/vanilla sugar
Instructions:
Beat cream until firm peaks form. Set aside to chill.
Ingredients for texture layers:
20 cm trifle bowl – 3 litres
3 melamakarona biscuits
1 loaf tsoureki
1 jar Visino 300g
10 koulouria biscuits
Construction of trifle:
Base – spread just a 2cm base layer of the yoghurt cheesecake mix.
Add the koulouria biscuits around like a flower. Break pieces to fill in any spaces. Push into cream base so they don’t float up when you add the jelly mix to set.
Add the mixed cherries saved from the cherry jelly recipe.
Pour in the cooled jelly mix.
Place into fridge to set – this normally takes about 2 hours. To speed it up you could put it in the freezer but make sure to cover it with glad wrap so ice crystals don’t form.
When jelly is set, add crispy kataifi pastry.
Add chilled custard.
Tear tsoureki into large bitesize pieces and place into custard and fill.
Chill for another 30 mins just so the tsoureki sets with the custard absorbs some of the moisture.
Add remaining cream yoghurt cheese mixture. Pour slowly around the edges working your way into the centre. Using a wet rubber spatula, even out yoghurt cream cheese mix and spread out. Cover and set aside to set and chill.
Pipe whipped cream on top with crumbled melomakarona.
Year 12 students who have achieved top marks in a language subject in the Higher School Certificate (HSC) will be offered the chance to take their language skills to the next level with an Interpreting Scholarship, the NSW Government has announced.
More than 5,000 students across NSW completed a language other than English as part of their HSC studies this year. Those that achieved a Band 6 in an extension language course will be offered a full or partial scholarship.
“Each of these students possess an incredibly valuable skill, and we want to reward their efforts and empower them to keep that skill alive by offering them to turn it into a formal qualification,” Mr Coure said.
“This can open up pathways for them to apply these skills in a future job or even show them the opportunities that exist as an interpreter among our expert panel of language professionals. On completing the scholarship and becoming accredited, they can work as certified interpreters while taking on further tertiary education.”
More than 400 scholarships have been awarded through the program since 2019, which have been facilitated through several educational institutions, including TAFE NSW, University of NSW and RMIT.
NSW Minister for Education and Early Learning, Sarah Mitchell, said the scholarships are part of the Liberals and Nationals Government’s commitment to ensuring students are prepared for life after school.
“The Class of 2022 are an exceptional group of young people with a bright future ahead of them. For those who excelled in languages in the HSC, these scholarships will open doors to a unique future career path,” Ms Mitchell said.
The NSW Education Standards Authority (NESA) will contact eligible students and offer them scholarships before the start of the 2023 university year.
Scholarships will be offered to students who achieved a Band 6 in the following language courses: Arabic, Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.
Federal Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship, Dan Tehan, has issued a special Christmas message this festive season.
In the message, Mr Tehan acknowledges the “incredible contribution” made by the Greek community to Australia and wishes everyone a joyful festive season.
Full Message in English:
Australia is a vibrant, thriving country today because we have successfully blended three stories: our Indigenous heritage, our British inheritance, and our multicultural achievement.
At this special time of year, I acknowledge the incredible contribution made to our country by the Greek Australian community and wish everyone, and their families, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
Dan Tehan, Federal Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship
Students who excelled in their VCE exams were awarded on Tuesday, December 20 at The Greek Centre in Melbourne, Victoria.
The event, organised by Greek Community of Melbourne (GCM), aimed to bring together all the students and parents of the wider Greek community in a celebration of their academic achievements.
On the night, GCM President Bill Papastergiadis, and many others, congratulated the students on their successes.
“The GCM has education as its core service offering. In that regard, this year the GCM is expanding its awards night by recognising not only VCE students that excelled in the subjects of modern Greek and ancient Greek, but also numerous other students that achieved high scores across all the subjects available at VCE,” Mr Papastergiadis said.
“Tonight’s event welcomes these students and their families to our 15-storey cultural centre and we encourage them to join the GCM in its broad range of events. Our future as an organisation and as a community rests with our next generation leaders which hopefully many of these high achievers will be a part of this group.
“We thank Victorian Multicultural Minister Colin Brooks for attending this event and making our organisation one of his first ports of call since his appointment to this portfolio. The Government has been a strong supporter of our education and cultural initiatives, and we look forward to partnering on many more exciting enterprises.”
Dr Nick Dallas, Convenor of the GCM’s Education Committee, also congratulated the students for their efforts and success.
“A large part of today’s event is to celebrate those students who excelled in Modern Greek. The fact that we have students who are third, fourth and fifth generation and continue to do Greek to such a high level is admirable,” Dr Dallas said.
“You should be proud of this achievement, you are our future language ambassadors, our future educators. The other cohort that’s been invited today are those of Greek background that excelled in specific subjects. We wish you every success in your future field of study.
“But something we’d like to encourage in all our students today, is to continue to engage with your identity and language is often the key. That’s the strength of multiculturalism in our state, people have diverse backgrounds and they’re all encouraged to celebrate them, no matter what they are. Continue to engage with the Greek Community, become members, attend their events, volunteer for projects, give something back to your community, you’ll feel better for it.”
Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Colin Brooks, also attended the awards ceremony and stated he was “proud to be here tonight, at [his] first Greek Event” since his receiving his new position.
The Minister further welcomed everyone with a Kalispera, before going on to acknowledge the challenges that this cohort of VCE students have faced in the recent years, but also made a point to congratulate all the students in attendance for their hard work and success.
Minister Brooks also thanked the GCM for hosting this event and inviting him to his first trip to The Greek Centre.
